This is an outrageous number considering that 53% of mobile visitors to your site won’t stick around unless your page loads in under 3 seconds.

Somehow, most websites are missing the “3 second” mark!

In this article, we will talk about what you can do to improve your mobile page load times, and also briefly indicate areas over which you have no control whatsoever. Let’s get started!

1. Optimize for Mobile Speed or Risk High Bounce Rates and Low Conversions.

Web traffic from mobile is more than half of overall web traffic. In their study, Google analyzed over 900,000 mobile landing pages from 126 countries. Results were not surprising but were also not impressive.

Over 70% of mobile pages took over 10 seconds to load completely. That included all visual content from above and below the fold.

Google used a deep neural network (which had 90% prediction accuracy) and was modeled on the nervous system and brain of a human. As page load times increase proportionately from 1 – 7 seconds, probable visitor bounce rates increased by 113%.

If the quantity of page elements increases from 400 – 6,000, conversion probability drops by 95%. Moreover, there were other interesting revelations.

2. Page size correlates with page speed.

Of the pages that were examined the following stats were revealed:

70% of pages were over 1MB in size

36% of pages were over 2MB in size

12% of pages were over 4 MB in size

A 1.49MB page takes 7 seconds to load over a fast 3G connection according to Google.

Customers are already long gone before the page has even completely presented itself. One site totaled out at 16MB. You do not stand a chance of impressing a mobile visitor with such slow download speed.

Contemplate splitting some articles in two. This strategy might expedite mobile access. It also presents double the ranking opportunity.

Remove what is not absolutely necessary from site pages. Slideshows can be a resource and speed hog, as are image galleries.

4. Accept that there are some mobile benchmarks over which you have no control.

No one can know the wireless connection speed a site visitor might be experiencing. A site that loaded in under 2 seconds at home over WiFi might take 7 seconds or more depending on their mobile carrier due to network constraints, network traffic, disruption of communication equipment, areas of coverage, and the list goes on.

Essentially, you can optimize your site until the cows are all safely in the barn, but it’s the points between your server and the phone to which your site data is being served that ultimately make the difference.

Key Takeaways for Mobile Page Speed Benchmarks

Be as careful as you can about the creation of your mobile pages, decreasing sizes wherever possible.

Keep a close eye on your mobile website page speed over time to make sure it stays as fast as possible.

For specific information about optimizing your website for mobile, chat with one of our experts at 1st on the List. We’ve been around longer than Google, and have some unique insights on optimizing for mobile.

Call us now at 1-888-262-6687!

Be sure to check out our additional articles about Page Speed and Site Performance:

Limelight Networks recently published a study called “The State of User Experience” which explored attitudes towards website performance. You may find the key findings interesting.

Visitors aren’t willing to wait for websites to load.

When asked how long are you willing to wait for a website to load before you get frustrated and leave the site, the medium time falls around 3 seconds according to this study.

Less than 1 second 1.67%

1-3 seconds 18.92%

3-5 seconds 38.62%

5+ seconds 40.79%

Visitors will buy from a competitor if the page takes too long to load.

Nearly 40% of visitors said they will leave your website and go to your competitor’s website to complete their purchase if your site is too slow.

Tablets, iPhones and Android Phones are among most popular mobile devices.

Combined these three type of devices make up 83% of mobile use. Surprisingly 14% of people say they don’t use a mobile device to access the Internet.

Performance expectations for mobile are on the rise.

Yes, 44% of respondents say they are willing to wait longer for a page to load on a mobile device. However, another 41% say they expect mobile devices to load equally fast.

Visitors are impartial to your website making recommendations based on previous visits.

Nearly 40% of visitors say, “No, I don’t want a website to remember that I’ve come before and make recommendations based on my previous visits.” Another 25% are impartial saying they don’t know or don’t care.

Limelight’s Key Takeaways

Performance is key to a great web experience.

Consumer web use is increasingly mobile.

The value of web experience personalization remains to be seen.

How fast does your website load? How is your mobile experience? You can check both of these factors using our SEO Tools or give us a call at 1-888-262-6687 for a personalized consultation of what your website needs to provide the best visitor experience possible.

A recent study by SearchMetrics.com analyzed websites ranking on the first three pages of results and found that on average, the Top 5 websites ranked loaded in less than 1.2 seconds and the Top 30 websites loaded in less than 1.3 seconds…. well below the 2 second rule of thumb.

This is why we put a lot of effort into helping our clients make their websites faster – there is a direct correlation between fast websites and rankings, traffic, conversions, purchases and profit.

In our newest Slideshare Presentation we share all the details and the studies that prove these claims. Check it out! And when you are finished, be sure to check your website speed in the link provided at the end of the presentation and then give us a call at 1-888-262-6687 or email us to get started on website speed optimization.

Did you know that in 2014 Site Speed was voted one of the top search ranking factors?

Site speed contributes to a better user experience overall and hundreds of businesses are finding that as they make their website faster they get better rankings, more traffic, higher conversion rates and ultimately more sales.

Here are 6 of the best free website speed test tools you can use to evaluate your website speed.

As you use these tools remember that the rule of thumb is a page should load in less than 2 seconds. Websites that rank in Top 30 positions load in less than 1.3 second mark (SearchMetrics.com).

Use this tool to run a full page test to find the load time of each page. This website speed test helps you analyze your page and find where slow bottlenecks occur. The tool also gives you the page load time, page size an overall grade out of 100 plus how fast your webpage is in comparison to all tested websites.

A favorite of our website auditors this free tool to test site speed gives you a score for both the first view and for the repeat view. It tells you how long it takes for the first byte to load, how long it takes to start rendering and the time, number of requests and bytes required for the page to fully load. The tool also gives you a letter grade for a number of speed factors including progressive JPEGs, cache static content, keep-alive content and compress transfer.

If you have Google Analytics set up to track your website traffic you can also see website speed for pages at specific points in time. Select Behavior from the left navigation and choose Site Speed Overview.

If you have Webmaster Tools set up for your website you can also see your average website speed over the last three months. Look for the average speed and any major spikes in load time, which can suggest server issues. Select Crawl from the left navigation and choose Crawl Stats.

This add-on available for most browsers grades your web page and offers suggestions to improve the page performance. It’s a great way to quickly test speed on any webpage you may visit and is great for competitor analysis too!

Is it time to make your website faster? Our Website Auditors are skilled at finding what is slowing your website down and providing prioritized lists of how to gradually improve your website speed. After all, Amazon found that a one second slow down could cost them $1.6 billion in sales each year.